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Simply French for Beginners - numbers practise with playing cards

In our 13th June 2018 session we used ordinary playing cards to practise our knowledge of numbers.

Rules:

we ignored the suits for this game, only using the numbers;

the dealer places one card on the table for a player, they have to say the number in French e.g. 5 = cinq);

They are then dealt a second card and they have to say this one in French and then add it to the first (e.g. 4 = quatre, so 4 et 5, c'est 9);

Then they have to view the cards as "tens" and "units", so in the above, cards 4 and 5 together reads as 45, so they have to say 45 in French;

Finally they are dealt a third card and they have to read this as hundreds, tens and units, so if card 7 was placed alongside 4 and 5, it reads as 745, and the player has to say 745 in French. We even added thousands by adding a 4th card...

Then you move to the next player and repeat.

to make the maths easier the picture cards dropped their "tens" value to only their "units" value - therefore: Jack which normally is 11, drops the ten and becomes 1; queen is normally 12 so drops the ten and becomes 2; King is normally 13 becomes 3, Ace becomes 1.

Some general French vocabulary for playing cards.

Picture card names:

Le valet = the jack

La dame = the queen

Le roi = the king

L’as = the ace (pronounced “ass”)

Suits:

Diamonds = Carreau

Clubs = Trèfle

Spades = Pique

Hearts = Cœur

So, Le deux de carreau = the 2 of diamonds

Le six de pique = the 6 of spades

Le roi de trèfle = the king of clubs

La dame de cœur = the queen of hearts

This entry was posted by Jon
and tagged french, numbers, cards
on Thursday, 14 June 2018 05:20
in blog Simply French for Beginnerssubscribe